Thursday, 29 December 2011

Prospects for 2012. Resource Struggles.

In his round up of international developments, The Guardian's correspondent Simon Tisdall omits any mention of the looming problem of resource conflicts in 2012.

A senior US military official said recently that he woke up every morning worrying that Israel might attack Iran's suspect nuclear installations. The US, he said, was talking to Tel Aviv "every day" about the inadvisability of such an attack. But pressure to "do something" about Iran will build through 2012 and could become fatally entangled with US election politics.

The general strategy of encircling Iran, strangling its economy and bringing about 'regime change' is held by most leading Democrats and Republicans. They differ only about the way of bringing it about. The goal is control over it's oil and gas, one reason why the War in Afghanistan will drag on till 2014 ( officially ).

The 'transition' between NATO protection of the New Silk Route ( aka the TAPI Pipeline ) and that of Afghans trained to protect it will do nothing to prevent the instability caused by Pakistan being forced to choose the TAPI Pipeline over the IPI one from Iran that would provide gas four times cheaper.

This strategy of blocking off Iranian gas exports is part of the sanctions policy being imposed on Iran. As the Express Tribune reports,

While Iran has massive gas reserves, the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project seems unlikelier by the day, given the current geo-political scenario. The US is strongly opposed to the pipeline and has been nudging Pakistan towards the hopelessly complicated TAPI pipeline project instead. On December 23, the National Bank of Pakistan refused to finance the IPI pipeline because of the threat of sanctions by the US. A recent purchase agreement signed with Turkmenistan has given some hope that a steady supply of gas may be achieved via TAPI by 2016, but that project is marred by numerous security threats.

Iran is now funding the Taliban in the absence of any regional peace plan for Afghanistan and the blatant attempt to destroy Iranian markets for gas. The result is that Iran is now threatening to cut off Western oil supplies at the Straits of Hormuz in reaction to this stranglehold.

The prospects for war with Iran are being ratcheted up as a consequence of NATO states being lethally overdependent upon supplies of oil and gas in far off and dangerous lands riven with sectarian and ethnic enmities and hatreds. Unless this reality is confronted the alternative is darkness.

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About the Blog

This blog is mostly about the New Great Game for resources across the globe, the impact of oil and gas dependency upon both Britain and the oil rich nations, the purported interconnections between foreign policy and terrorism, the growth of Islamism and the mendacious nature of much 'Public Diplomacy'. It also seeks to anticipate the forthcoming threats to world peace by discerning the true nature of the new emerging psychopathologies that come with the struggle over diminishing natural resources, global warming, proxy conflicts and the prospect of civilisational collapse in regions such as the Middle East, Central Africa and the Maghreb.